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Comment by ericol | Hacker News Reader

TL;DR: They are being accused of ad fraud, without any evidence provided, and they are asked to reply with an analysis of why they think their traffic ?? is legit (when they have no idea what is it that Google considered "not legitimate").

The biggest issue here I don't think is the malware tag, but the ad fraud accusation.

Even thought as somebody pointed out the page linked can be biased, based only on what they state and the emails from Google, this is another case of David Against (automated) Goliath.

From my point of view this is just another drop in the pound of what is already being built as a case against Google (and also Apple) for monopoly.

P.S.: I've used Droidscript in the past, and I do think it's too powerful an app that can be abused. But that happens to a lot of things in life, right?

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the ad-fraud accusation is my biggest concern as well.

they provide no information or clues leaving the author to guess.

the author guesses that somehow someone extracted their identifiers from the apk.

google comes back and says more clearly that it's something to do with how the ads are positioned, essentially accusing them of trying to trick people to accidentally click.

this information should have been provided before the appeal, and google gains literally nothing from hiding this information from the author.

the malware claims have more validity, but the way they handled the ad-fraud claim is inexcusable.

Ad fraud will just fix their errors if Google provides any information about how it detected the ad fraud. They're fine with some false positives if it means 99%+ of ad fraud is squashed.

It is extremely possible that from Google's point of view, an inability to give such an analysis is itself justification to remove the app from the Play Store.

If Droidscript is flexible enough to allow end-users to create an ad fraud engine, it's too flexible for the store. Play Store is relatively consistent in its position that a tool that bootstraps policy violations is itself a policy violation.

But it would be great if Google could offer a concrete reproduction case, and from a developer-service standpoint it completely sucks that they don't.

Is there a service where I can host a raspi on my network and let people send it instructions about which ads should be clicked on and it gradually earns crypto over time?

I'd love to make some money while fucking with ad networks... :)

I'm not sure, but I'm going to note that click-fraud already exists and Google (as well as other ad networks) have countermeasures to determine whether your raspi is likely "clicking for fun" and chargeback the advertisers for the non-human clicks.

Whether those countermeasures can be reliably defeated is left as an exercise for the raspi owner. ;)

Instead of enriching particular sites, I wonder if adding a bunch of click fraud could punish others. Does 10,000 clicks being detected as fraud only invalidate those 10k clicks or does google use heuristics so that those 10k get extrapolated and punishes the valid traffic as well? Can you send enough bathwater that they'll automatically throw out the baby?

You're welcome to try.

Google has well-compensated software engineers who's full-time job is to figure out shenanigans like that.

I hear some of them even read Hacker News. ;)

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